


Missed Signs

by rea_of_sunshine



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Deaf Character, Deaf Eddie Kaspbrak, First Kiss, Fluff, Jealous Richie Tozier, Light Angst, M/M, Miscommunication, Pining Richie Tozier, Sort of? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25343227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rea_of_sunshine/pseuds/rea_of_sunshine
Summary: Richie stared at Eddie for a long moment, weighing how much it would suck to sit there and play middle-man for some guy trying to pick up the love of his life versus how much he’d hate himself if he just left them to it with a pen and piece of paper and it ended up the guy was a serial killer or something. Or if he ended up being the love ofEddie’slife when Richie could have stopped it…Or, some guy asks Richie to translate his pick-up lines to a Deaf Eddie, and Richie doesn'texactlycooperate.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 38
Kudos: 419





	Missed Signs

**Author's Note:**

> you guys: You feeling okay, rea?? You're giving us a one-shot not even a day after posting a 9k chapter?? 
> 
> me, clinging to the threads of this manic burst with everything in me: we're on the up-swing, buckos!!

As soon as he walked into the bar, he saw Eddie sitting alone at a table, beer sweating down onto the Formica top, eyes squinted as they tore over the subtitles on a TV across the room. Richie took just a minute to appreciate the sight of him, his dark hair throwing back shocks of blue from the Bud Light sign flickering over him, the relaxed tilt of his shoulders, the angry pout that meant whatever team he was rooting for on the TV was losing. 

Richie’d loved him from the first moment he’d seen him, Eddie defiant, even at age ten, while Henry Bowers hurled unheard insults at him, and now, fifteen years later, it felt like a lifetime too late to do anything about it. 

He shook the thought away and strode over to him. 

“Hey, Spaghetti, sorry I’m late,” he said, signing automatically when he saw Eddie’s eyes fall on him. Eddie smiled back and raised his hands. 

“Hey, Rich,” he signed, two fingers of his right hand curling around each other while the rest clawed down around his bicep. 

Eddie had given him that name sign—a combination of the letter R and the sign for _itch_ —after ten-year-old Richie had worked up the nerve to talk to him, learned he was deaf, and had Eddie take mercy enough to push over a pen and paper. Richie had scrawled his name and watched with rapt attention as Eddie signed back each letter. Then, Richie wrote that his name rhymed with itchy, just a dumbass enough to not realize that rhyming isn’t exactly a _thing_ for Deaf people. The proclamation had made Eddie laugh so hard that he snorted. After that, he’d always been R-itch. 

Eddie’s hands flew on, “How was work?” 

Richie shrugged. “Eh, you know. There’s only so many dishes you can wash before your big break is bound to happen,” he said, smiling as Eddie beamed at him. 

“It’ll happen,” Eddie signed, his movements as quick and sure as the sincerity in his face. Richie tried not to let himself warm too much at Eddie’s surety of his comedic talent. Instead, he flagged down the waitress for a beer and settled into the familiar back and forth with Eddie. 

He’d just settled into the sight of Eddie full-body laughing across from him at a dumb anecdote Richie gave when he felt someone at his elbow. Richie turned, still grinning, to thank their waitress for bringing back his drink. 

It was not, however, their waitress. Instead, it was a whip-thin man with a sharp-cut jaw who was smiling, soft-eyed, at Eddie’s fading laughter. 

“Hi,” the guy said, offering his hand out. “Sorry to interrupt, I just saw you sitting by yourself earlier, and I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Jack.” 

Richie watched, working to hide a sneer, as Eddie politely shook the guy’s hand. 

The silence stretched out. 

Normally, this was the point where—if whoever was talking to Eddie wasn’t skeeving Richie the fuck out—he’d jump in and offer an explanation of why Eddie wasn’t of the particularly talkative breed. But, as it were, the guy _was_ in fact skeeving Richie the fuck out, and he was at least ninety percent sure that it wasn’t just jealousy. Okay, like seventy percent. Thirty-five, at the very least. 

But then, Eddie’s eyes slid over to him, wide and clearly uncomfortable, and Richie squirmed. He hated seeing Eddie uncomfortable. 

“He can’t hear you, dude,” Richie said to the guy, signing along out of habit. Jack turned to Richie with a frown, then looked back at Eddie. 

“Sorry,” Eddie signed, offering an apologetic shrug. 

“Oh,” Jack said. He shifted his weight, then turned back to Richie. “Uh, are you two, like, together?” 

Richie, already sensing where this was going, had to work really, really hard not to sock the guy straight in the face, but somehow, he managed. 

“No,” he bit out. 

“Do you think you could maybe translate for me?” Jack asked, all hopeful and conventionally attractive. Richie hated him.

Richie, despite every instinct urging him to tell the guy to go fuck himself, glanced at Eddie. He was a grown man, and as much as Richie hated that he would never choose him, Eddie deserved to make his own choices. He raised a barely-perceptible shoulder at Richie’s head-tilt, and Richie sighed. 

“Eddie, this is Jack,” Richie said, signing as he went. His fingers fumbled a little over spelling out Eddie’s name—normally, he used the sign for spaghetti, even though it had earned him more than one kick to the shin, both for disregarding Eddie’s chastisement of him giving a name sign as a Hearing person and for also picking one that was so very _Richie_ —before he chose to willfully ignore the name-sign chastisement again and used the sign for “donkey” in addition to spelling out Jack’s name. Exactly as expected, the toe of Eddie’s shoe connected with Richie’s kneecap, and Richie snickered. 

“Don’t be a dick,” Eddie warned quickly, furrowing his eyebrows menacingly. Richie grinned at him and turned his face up to Jack. 

“He says for you not to be a dick,” Richie said, signing as he went, but Eddie knocked his hands down to the table as soon as he realized what he was doing. Eddie snapped Richie’s attention back to him and slashed out a sharp, _stop_ , and Richie sighed. 

“Offer him a chair,” Eddie signed. Richie stared at him for a long moment, weighing how much it would suck to sit there and play middle-man for some guy trying to pick up the love of his life versus how much he’d hate himself if he just left them to it with a pen and piece of paper and it ended up the guy was a serial killer or something. Or if he ended up being the love of _Eddie’s_ life when Richie could have stopped it…

“You wanna sit?” Richie asked, glancing up at Jack. Jack beamed at both of them before dragging out the chair closest to Richie and settling down into it.

“Can you ask him how his day’s going?” Jack asked. Richie wasn’t sure if he was more annoyed that the dick wasn’t looking at him at all or that he was showing a real interest in Eddie by maintaining eye-contact. Richie rolled his eyes and signed the question to Eddie. 

Richie spent the next few minutes being the world’s most uncomfortable third-wheel, signing and speaking polite conversation back and forth between his Deaf best friend the guy hitting on him, respectively. 

It was made a little better, however, by the private smirk Eddie sent his way when, instead of giving Jack his own name sign, he used the one for donkey, like Richie had done. It was then, Eddie’s grin shining with a joke just for him, that something turned in him. He really didn't _have_ to sit there as a non-biased third party. All the possibilities in the world were, literally, at his fingertips. 

The next time that Jack asked him to relay something to Eddie, Richie’s hands flew before he could stop them. 

“I really like your sweater,” Jack said to Eddie, but Richie’s brow furrowed, and his hands said, “He thinks your sweater is ugly.” 

Eddie’s smile slipped a bit, and he looked down at his shirt—an unassuming deep gray V-neck that Eddie happened to look incredible in—before shifting his gaze back to Richie. 

“Ugly?” he signed back, brow furrowed, like maybe Richie had used the wrong word. Richie swallowed and nodded, even went so far as to spell it out. Eddie’s frown deepened. “That’s rude,” he signed. 

“He says he likes yours, too,” Richie said flatly to Jack, not turning his head away from Eddie. 

Richie’s heart slammed through the rest of the conversation, each compliment or come-on Jack fed him contorted on his fingertips until it was an insult or a brush-off handed down to Eddie. Eddie grew redder and redder as he tracked Richie’s hands, which made Richie feel more than a little shitty, but he’d committed, and anyway, Eddie stopped watching him somewhere between a jab at his boring desk job and boasting how many guys Jack always had blowing up his phone, so Richie knew he’d checked out of the conversation. He was just glaring at Jack’s mouth and signing short, civil replies to every nasty thing Richie signed. 

When Jack asked if he could take him out some time, Eddie’s eyes slid over to Richie, narrowed and dangerous. Richie gulped, but he had committed, damn it. 

“He wants to know if you have any hotter friends,” Richie signed, wide-eyed. 

He just had time to clock the smallest of twitches in Eddie’s jaw before he stood up abruptly and stormed off, leaving both Richie and Jack staring after him, slack-mouthed. 

“Was it something I said?” Jack asked faintly, but Richie barely heard him. Eddie was now standing the bar glaring at him. 

“Get over here,” Eddie signed furiously at him, murder in his eyes. 

“Fuck,” Richie breathed, pushing himself out of the chair and making his way slowly over to Eddie. As soon as he was within spitting distance, Eddie’s hands were a flurry of motion. 

“What the fuck, Richie!?” he signed, punctuating it with a sharp jab of his fingers against Richie’s sternum. 

“I know. What a jackass, right?” Richie signed back, offering a consolatory shrug and a hand against Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie slapped him off. 

“No! You’re the one who’s being a jackass. What’s your problem?” 

Richie gulped.

“What do you mean?” he asked. But the slowly sinking feeling in his stomach told him he already knew the answer. When Eddie’s hands came up to respond, Richie fought the urge to clench his eyes closed. 

“You know I can read lips, right?” Eddie demanded, and yeah, some distant, far-away part of his brain knew that Eddie read lips… It was just a part of his brain that had been conveniently silenced by unwarranted possessiveness and stupidity. 

“Fuck,” Richie sighed, scrubbing a hand over his forehead. Then, he brought his knuckles to his chest and scrubbed out a circle. “I’m so sorry.” 

Eddie’s eyes never left Richie’s face, never softened. 

“Why were you doing that?” 

“I’m so sorry,” Richie signed again. 

“That’s not what I asked, Richie.” Eddie’s hands seemed to whistle through the air as they formed the words. Richie flinched away from them. 

“He was a douchebag,” Richie said limply, but Eddie just shook his head and shoved his shoulder again. 

“You were a douchebag,” Eddie signed, throwing all of his weight forward onto the _you_. “He was being nice. What’s your problem?” 

Richie lifted a shoulder and looked away. Jack was still sitting at their table, watching them with a confused frown. Richie felt Eddie’s hands fall onto his chest, softer this time, drawing his gaze back around. He swallowed hard and met Eddie’s dark eyes. 

“What’s wrong?” Eddie signed. His face had fallen away from the anger and settled squarely into concern, which, honestly, was just not fair. 

He knew Richie couldn’t deny the big puppy-dog eyes. 

“I was jealous,” Richie whispered. He didn’t know why he’d whispered. Eddie couldn’t hear him anyway, and more than that, for all the years he’d spent studying and learning ASL, he didn’t know the sign for jealous, so he was forced to spell out every letter in agonizing clarity. Just as he clenched his fist into the S, he closed his eyes, unwilling to see Eddie tell him that it would never happen, to get over himself, to go straight to hell and never speak to him again. 

“Richie,” Eddie said, his voice stretching out over his name, making Richie’s insides twist tighter. Eddie didn’t speak much in public, too insecure about what he sounded like to use his voice with many people other than Richie himself, but Richie thought his name on Eddie’s lips would be the death of him. It would be those six little letters curling around Eddie’s tongue that finally took his insides and ripped them clean out of him. He also knew that if Eddie was speaking, he owed it to him to open his eyes and listen. 

Richie swallowed and pried his eyes open. 

“You’re dumb,” Eddie said, signing along and smiling a bit. 

Suddenly, all the tension drained out of Richie, leaving nothing but a bittersweetness seething through him instead. He should have known that even if Eddie would never reciprocate, he’d never just cut Richie out. They were friends. They loved each other, in whatever form that took. 

“Asshole,” Richie signed back, huffing a small laugh. 

Eddie shook his head, but he was still smiling, something soft and sweet that sparked the bittersweet inside him into a raw ache. Richie’d loved him as long as he’d known him, but they’d get through this. They’d go back to normal. 

“I’m serious,” Eddie signed, and Richie nodded. 

“I know. I’m sorry,” he said again, but Eddie just shook his head more fervently. 

“You’re dumb to be jealous.” Eddie spelled out the word jealous, then made a hook by his mouth and dragged over his jaw, showing Richie the sign. “You’re dumb to be jealous of him, of anyone.” Eddie’s hands froze for a moment, twitching a bit before he swallowed and pushed them out again. “You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted, Richie.” 

Richie blinked at him, sure that he was misinterpreting the signs Eddie had just given him. 

“One more time,” he said dumbly, but Eddie just smiled. 

“You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted, Richie,” he signed again, slower, leaving no room for error. Richie watched those hands, those blunt, perfect fingers tracking out every word he’d ever wanted from Eddie, and when he tore his gaze up to Eddie’s face, it was smiling and soft. 

“You’re not fucking with me?” Richie asked, his hands knocking together so much that he was suddenly glad Eddie _could_ read lips. Eddie shook his head. Then, just in case Richie needed further confirmation, those blunt, perfect fingers were fitting over Richie’s cheeks and tugging him down into a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> I did my best to accurately represent the Deaf community here, but as I am Hearing, you are fully within your rights to yell at me until I cry if I fucked it up. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed this soft little fic<3


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